Sydney Opera House: A talk by Peter Murray OBE

Recorded Tuesday May 28th, 2024 at The Gallery, London EC1
Commissioned explicitly to put Sydney on the map of global cities, The Sydney Opera House was the progenitor of the nineties and noughties concept of building as symbol of place - exemplified by building like the Bilbao Guggenheim , the Stratford Aquatics Centre and even the Burj Khalifa.
Danish architect Jørn Utzon won the job to design the scheme in an International competition in 1957, with construction starting in 1959. Yet by the time of the building’s formal opening in 1973, it became internationally famous for its torturous build, causing a cost overrun of 1400% - from 7 to 100 million ASD. Its notoriety ensured the project its own chapter in Peter Hall’s 1980 classic Great Planning Disasters.
In this talk, Peter Murray OBE, author of The Saga of Sydney Opera House and the Co-Founder of NLA, will reveal the inside story of this Australian icon, based on confidential files from the Arup archives.
Before Sydney, the architect gave the engineers their drawings and the engineers made them stand up. After Sydney architects like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers sat down with their engineers at the start of a project, before any drawings were done. Utzon’s winning scheme was famously drawn without the assistance of any engineer at all and it changed the way architectural competitions were organised around the world. The Opera House was the first major project to be designed and built with the aid of computers.
Utzon himself suggested he designed the building at a time "where the reigning functionalism had not yet yielded to the idea of giving buildings a more humane expression.” Arup’s Jack Zunz thought it was responsible for the diminution of the architect's role and the rise of the project manager, yet it also popularised the collaboration of architect and engineer.
It may have been a one-off, but its influence has been far-reaching.

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I'm a serious student of the reasons the Opera House didn't end up as Utzon designed it. This talk by Peter Murray is the best of all those I seen and heard, so many of which avoided the bits John Cleese advised to avoid mentioning. An example is the ambulance chasing Arup as soon as he saw what he could get out of being the man for the engineering of this masterpiece--viz fame and wealth. Same with other bits left unsaid but are crucial to understanding what Marx knew when he said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. Your suggestion that the building was commissioned explicitly to put Sydney on the map of global cities is not how I understand the early stages of the farce. It was considered by most of the players and hangers-on as just another building with nebulous reasons for existing. Were the aim you suggest true, the ensuing follies that made it infamous wouldn't have been allowed to happen. Aussie solidarity would have prevailed. The follies happened by design and with glee, not by accident. The whole affair was in the hands of dilettantes and mediocrities. The thing that soured the whole undertaking was the infantile antipathy between the two major political parties, one culture conscious and the other philistine (and nothing has changed in the interim but the fact that philistinism had got the upper hand all round). Premier Cahill knew Askin's troglodytes would do all they could to derail the project. As Premier, he was better placed than anyone else to know. His nose was right up against the glass. And he was proved right. Starting far too early in an atmosphere of sniper attacks was what sent the Sydney Opera House project off the tracks and into the sham it became. However capricious and flawed Utzon's design happened to be, the man himself was of that same mould--flawed and capricious. He refused to accept Jenkins's (of Arups) ideas for the shells, as well as Zunz's ideas for steel cored shells. They weren't honest enough for Utzon, so what did he do? He went with the farcical concrete fan arches that were as dishonest as it gets if honest shells are the aim. FLW, Candela, Nervi et al all agreed. Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan (2012) validated Jack Zunz's advice to Utzon. If Utzon's design had to be built today, it could be done just as he wanted it. The bad news is that Arup’s Jack Zunz was right in thinking the Opera House debacle as responsible for the diminution of the architect's role and the rise of the project manager. Architecture is now a service industry, not a profession. It's become the harlot of the developer lobby. And architects don't have the decency to hang their heads in shame. They didn't have what it takes to stand up for their sacred calling.